have you ever considered to bring each of those issues to the forum, one by one, in appropriate topics?

I'm not using FF, I dumped that thing since version 3. I'm using Chromium build 17, LastPass 2.0.8 stopped working all of a sudden. Chrome I tried to install latest from Google's website .deb package for Debian, mint-flashplugin-11 is installed on system. Should I perhaps try to install Chrome with flashplayer-nonfree?

LastPass stopped working has nothing to do with Linux Mint. In all honesty, you should take up your complains with LastPass and their forced auto-update that can't be turned off. They broke their support for older chrome browsers and don't really care to fix it. Plus Chrome can be updated outside of Linux Mint.

Inoki wrote:Using Google Chrome now, everything seems to be fine. What I like especially when installing certain apps like Chrome from Google is it automatically adds itself to your list of repos for updates. This could be a handy feature for all future apps for LMDE as well.

Apps messing up the sources.list that's not less than a Windows behavior: any app, autoupdate, opaque binaries from many third-parties, multisourced version conflicts, more messed up dependencies..Remember that Chrome is closed source and does contain fingerprinting technology to trace your activity and report it back to Google. And with Google's repos added and unpinned, they can theoretically install anything they want on your pc through "updating" the app you wanted. An extreme solution that I wouldn't recommend for the ones who aren't happy of Chromium 17, or LMDE's update pack releases Better trust an open community for providing binaries and source code.

To get closer to the main subject: as you can imagine when UP5 will be released it will be quite a chaos (very slow download speed, even server downtime). So I'm coming back with my BitTorrent idea (providing repository mirror maintainers with the full update pack in a torrent, then a "touch-script" clearing the modtimes to ensure rsync won't redownload all the mess). Now is a good time to test it, and now is also a good time to build a repository mirror, especially if you want to be from the "incoming" testers. Contact me if you need more information

If this isn't being implemented, this would be a great idea and one that I also just thought of. I just downloaded the latest version of Libreoffice through a torrent from the main site and the speed is incredible. Now that BitTorrent has included Web Seeds, a server can act as a torrent peer. This means that the torrent will always be active and almost always faster than a HTTP download. Not to mention a dramatic reduction in bandwidth for the server. I'd prefer to get my UP5 in a torrent!

ketoth wrote:To get closer to the main subject: as you can imagine when UP5 will be released it will be quite a chaos (very slow download speed, even server downtime). So I'm coming back with my BitTorrent idea (providing repository mirror maintainers with the full update pack in a torrent, then a "touch-script" clearing the modtimes to ensure rsync won't redownload all the mess). Now is a good time to test it, and now is also a good time to build a repository mirror, especially if you want to be from the "incoming" testers. Contact me if you need more information

If this isn't being implemented, this would be a great idea and one that I also just thought of. I just downloaded the latest version of Libreoffice through a torrent from the main site and the speed is incredible. Now that BitTorrent has included Web Seeds, a server can act as a torrent peer. This means that the torrent will always be active and almost always faster than a HTTP download. Not to mention a dramatic reduction in bandwidth for the server. I'd prefer to get my UP5 in a torrent!

Not really the point for the end user I guess, unless you want to stuff about 266 GB of data in your APT cache There is apt-p2p who could help for big packages (like game data, LibreOffice,..), but initiating P2P exchange for every single little library package is very slow.According to my tests it COULD be possible with a unique torrent and build an updater who "picks" the files it needs for this torrent: the torrent file itself weights about 30 MB (and most BitTorrent clients I tested couldn't correctly parse the content, too many files I guess). Once the package selection made, the updater could retrieve them through webseeds. Using a constant BitTorrent transfer would be problematic, some people don't want BitTorrent daemons running permanently on their pc and/or do have limited and metered bandwidth.

Anyway starting now the repository mirroring uses a pool-based system: 2 folders, one for latest, one for incoming (a symlink makes them accessible through /latest and /incoming). Once the UP5 ready, repository mirrors won't have to rsync the full archive while everybody else wants to upgrade: just a quick rsync to update the symlink to point to the other pool, and voilà The issue now is that these repository mirrors, to be useful in reducing the server load on the main sever, actually have to be.. used. For example during the mintinstall the user could be asked if he wants only the main server or wants to add geographically close servers to his sources.list (with a correct pinning so the main server is used only as a fallback in case of mirror downtime). And: the Mint team is setting up additional servers so the upgrade will be as smooth as possible for everybody

So...it's been awhile...UP5 still not officially released. Any idea when UP5 will hit the stable repository? Any particularly bad blocking issues? Making everyone happy is a pipe dream. Please release when it's "good enough".

In LMDE, Update Pack 5 reached “incoming” and should hit “latest” by the end of August. The mirror strategy was changed to face the upcoming demand in bandwidth and new servers will be purchased or rented by our project to make sure the release goes as smooth as possible.